Miscellany

A couple weeks ago I discovered that the first two Cinerama films had been released on DVD, in both letterbox, and a peculiar format called Smilebox. After going a little research it appears this isn't just some goofy name for a gimmick, but a legitimate process that is being applied to other extremely-wide-screen films as well. Cinerama is a true three-strip, three-projector process. Due to wide field of vision, Cinerama screens actually curved around the audience, both pulling the viewer into the action, and avoiding nasty parallax. These films were eventually reduced to a single strip intended for a flat screen, but trying to project such a thing on a curve doesn't work. The Smilebox format, which presents a curved interpretation of the image on a flat screen, actually corrects for the distortion that would otherwise be caused by manipulating the image so. The only hangup with this format, is you need a big screen to really make it work. Watching Youtube clips of it on my iPad was a bust. But viewing it at work on a 19" LCD screen while only sitting a foot or so away..and with earphones in..pulled me right into the action like you wouldn't believe! This gets a man thinking...for the drive-in rebuild, perhaps I should consider a screen wide enough to support this format.

In a similar vein, the last time I was in an IMAX theater was many years ago, possibly an ALPHA trip back in high school, and it was a dedicated theater such that the seat rows were practically at a 45 deg angle, if not more. So when I was in Chicago recently and drove by a theater that had the IMAX logo on the outside along with other popular movies, I got curious. A quick google search showed that it was some sort of nation-wide adopted IMAX standard projected in a more conventional setting. I couldn't pass this up, and bought a ticket for the 9:40PM showing of Skyfall. That, and a drink, set me back 20 bucks, but it was worth it! Now, if you do a little research, you'll find that the director never intended for this movie to be shown in this format, but because the film was overshot and cropped later for letterbox, each frame had sufficient image information to fit the IMAX frame. You might think the result is a lot of extra sky and floor, and in any other film, you'd be right, but in a constant action thriller like this, you never notice it, and I knew this little tidbit going in. The screen was 48' wide according to the ceiling tiles, and yes, it had a slight curve to it, too. As a Bond flick, it's one of the best to come out in the past 20 years. I'd see it again in a heartbeat, but do yourself a favor, and find the biggest screen you can.